What Video Actually Costs in Metro Detroit

Nobody publishes prices, which is annoying if you are the one trying to budget. So here is how the money actually works in this market, what moves the number, and what a quote should contain before you sign it.

We are not going to print a single figure and call it the price, because anybody who does that is either quoting for work they have not scoped or hoping you do not ask what is excluded. What we can do is show you the shape of it.

The three things you are actually buying

Almost every video quote breaks into the same three parts, and understanding the split tells you most of what you need to know.

Pre-production. Concept, script, shot list, scheduling, locations, permits if you need them. On a simple social shoot this is an hour. On a commercial it can be a week, and it is the week that decides whether the shoot day works.

The shoot day. Crew, cameras, lighting, audio, travel. This is the part people picture when they picture video, and it is usually the smallest share of the total.

Post-production. Editing, colour, sound, motion graphics, revisions, and cutting the thing down into every aspect ratio you need. On short-form social work this is the bulk of the hours by a wide margin. A one-hour shoot can be three days of editing once you are cutting twenty separate posts out of it.

If a quote gives you one number and no sense of this split, ask for the split.

What drives the price up

In rough order of impact:

• Number of locations. Every move costs setup and teardown. Two locations is not twice one location, but it is not far off.
• People on camera. Talent, wardrobe, and the simple fact that people need direction and take time.
• Number of deliverables. One ninety-second film is far cheaper than one film plus fifteen cutdowns, even though the shoot is identical.
• Turnaround. A rush job displaces other work and gets priced accordingly.
• Revision rounds. Two included is normal. Unlimited is not a thing anyone can actually afford to offer, and a quote promising it is usually hiding the limit elsewhere.

What does not drive it as much as you think

Camera gear. There is a persistent belief that a more expensive camera means a more expensive quote, and past a certain floor it simply does not. The cost is hours, and hours are mostly editing.

Retainer versus project

For a restaurant or a local shop, project-by-project is usually the wrong shape. You pay the pre-production overhead every single time, you get an unpredictable feed, and the account never builds momentum because the posting is lumpy.

A monthly retainer with a contracted number of videos and a fixed posting interval costs less per video and produces a steadier feed. The tradeoff is commitment: you are agreeing to months, not to one Saturday.

For a commercial, a one-off project is exactly right. It is a different job with a different life span.

How to read a quote

Before you agree to anything, get these in writing:

1. The deliverable count and the formats. “Social videos” is not a deliverable. “Twelve vertical videos per month, 9:16, under 30 seconds, captioned” is.
2. Who owns the footage, including the raw files, not just the edits. Practices vary and you want to know before, not after.
3. What a revision is. Colour tweaks and a music swap are revisions. Re-cutting to a new concept is a new edit.
4. Who posts it, and who writes the captions. This is the most commonly skipped line and the most commonly argued about later.
5. What happens if you need to cancel. Notice period, and what you keep.

The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest outcome

Not because cheap work is always bad. There are good people starting out who are genuinely underpricing themselves. It is because the usual failure mode of a cheap video engagement is not bad footage. It is that you get a folder of files, nobody posts them, and a year later the conclusion is that video does not work for your business.

You did not buy video. You bought a folder.

The thing worth paying for is whatever makes the posting actually happen every week after the shoot is over.

Where we sit

We quote per project after a call, and the quote is fixed. For ongoing social work we set a contracted video count and a posting interval up front, and we track delivered-versus-contracted so you can see exactly where it stands.

If you want a real number for your situation, book fifteen minutes and describe the job. If we are too expensive for what you need, we will tell you that on the call rather than after a proposal.